Currently and in the past 20th Century, millions of automobiles around the world have been installed with mechanical long-bladed windshield wipers for cleaning and clearing rain, snow, ice and dirt. However, through the years, drivers and passengers traveling aboard these vehicles have always encountered the annoying oscillating back-and-forth operations of these wipers that distract their field of vision and concentration, pre-disposing them to harm.
Moreover, as the long blades of these wipers streak across the windshields, they easily get loose, worn out and torn through repeated use, thus needing frequent adjustments, repairs or replacements. These problems add to the cost of automobile maintenance and delays in travel plans during hazardous weather conditions, and therefore are not conducive to safeguarding them from the perils of potential collisions, wrecks, bodily injury and increase in insurance costs.
Based on current patent searches and publications on windshield wipers, the issued patents, publications and adapted inventions on the subject matter reveal complicated designs and operations, requiring numerous mechanical parts and linkages to support the long wiper blades. The prior and current mechanical long-bladed windshield wipers lack maximum frontal and rearward visibilities for the automobile drivers and passengers during mild, moderate and intense rainy, icy, snowy, foggy and dusty conditions. Prior-art and current externally exposed vision-distracting long-bladed automobile windshield wipers are not practical for installation to the right-side and the left-side automobile windshields and side-view mirrors.
Hundreds of millions of prior-art windshield wipers installed and currently used in most automobiles also lack provisions for automatic wiping and cleaning of the left and right side-view mirrors, which, in reality, is a very much needed requirement for attaining safer automobile driving. Whenever, the driver maneuvers his or her automobile forward or rearward or swerving or turning to the left or to the right, or changing lanes during rainy or snowy days or nights, the driver has to manually wipe the left-side and right-side windshields and side-view mirrors, in order to achieve better and clearer visibility so as to avoid the dangers of collision with other automobiles on the road, and prevent hitting other obstacles along the way. While driving through sudden heavy rain, snow, ice and dusty situations, drivers may have to slow down or stop driving, thereby he or she, including the inboard passengers are delayed.
Since the original U.S. Pat. No. 743,801 was granted to Mary Anderson in 1903, the main principles behind the long-bladed mechanical windshield wipers still remain basically unchanged, except for some additional upgraded innovations patented in 1917 issued to Charlotte Bridgewood, and issued to Robert Kearns who invented the intermittent windshield wiper in 1967 with U.S. Pat. No. 3,351,836.
Other inferior prior-art examples are: U.S. Pat. No. 8,555,456 issued to Ehde; U.S. Pat. No. 8,535,462B2 granted to Castro, et al; WO200347928A2 to Anise Lohokare; and U.S. Pat. No. 7,150,795 B2 to Russell J. Javaruthi, etc. There was an attempt to reduce the problems of oscillating long-bladed windshield wipers to improve better visibility for the automobile drivers, which was the subject of an ultrasonic wiper described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,768,556 granted in 1988 to Kenro Motoda which comprises of an ultrasonic wiper for conveying fluid off of the windshield glass of a vehicle by means of ultrasonic oscillators that excite progressive waves in the glass in a predetermined directional movement. The ultrasonic vibrations cause the progressive waves to move from one side of the windshield to the other side, so that rain and snow that adhere to the windshield external glass surfaces are subjected to the thrust forces leading to the downward fall of the adhering rain and snow on the windshield glass. However, this particular innovation was not successfully implemented because of functional limitations.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,171,683 (1963) granted to Arthur Ludwig involving an array of ultrasonic means, and US 2013/0298419 A1 published on Nov. 14, 2013 invented by David Robert Murray Trevett and Patrick Naven Trevett, which involve vaporizing precipitation from a surface of a window-shield were not successful for global implementation on modern automobiles. These ultrasonic inventions, once activated have been shown to take longer periods of time to be effective. The innovations presently being developed by McLaren are costly to replace and maintain and may cause gradual erosion of the molecular constituents of the external surfaces of windshields. Due to the disadvantages of the prior art, the present invention has been invented to provide various important innovative non-vision distracting and safer wiping and cleaning devices, methods systems, assemblies and programs that are much better in automobile operational features solving the many shortcomings of the above prior art.
Amphibian and aquatic vehicles still rely on the prior-art long bladed windshield wipers that are distracting to the field of vision of the operators and inboard passengers. Also, the prior-art devices and currently used practices for the wiping and cleaning the external surfaces of the viewing transparent shielding of high-rise. medium-rise and low-rise buildings, still largely depend on the time-consuming and costly methods and devices as accomplished by the climbing and clinging and dangling manual operators who are pre-disposed to the dangers of falling and the visually-induced fear of heights.
The present invention, being automatically programmable in effectively cleaning and clearing the various windshields, can also be used for the driverless automobiles currently being developed by Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, thus providing clearer-view for the passengers aboard the driverless automated vehicles, during rain, snow and icy weather, thereby eliminating the installation and use of the prior-art visual field annoying long-bladed oscillating windshield wipers.